‘Mamma! The eyeglasses!’

‘Gently, my dear, you’ll knock me over!’

Immediately, a small crowd formed. Donna Mariuccia, Don Peppino, one of the Greborios, who had stopped to rest on a chair before starting up the stairs, the Amodios’ maid, who was just then returning, and, of course, Pasqualino and Teresella, who wanted to see, too, and yelled, holding out their hands. Nunziata, for her part, was observing the dress that she had taken out of the newspaper, with a disappointed expression.

‘Look, Mariuccia, it’s an old rag … all worn out under the arms!’ she said, approaching the group. But who was paying attention to her? At that moment, Donna Rosa was extracting from a pocket in her dress the eyeglasses case, and with infinite care, she opened it. On her long red hand, a kind of very shiny insect with two giant eyes and two curving antennae glittered in a pale ray of sun amid those poor people, full of admiration.

‘Eight thousand lire … a thing like that!’ said Donna Rosa, gazing at the eyeglasses religiously, and yet with a kind of rebuke.

Then, in silence, she placed them on Eugenia’s face, as the child ecstatically held out her hands, and carefully arranged the two antennae behind her ears. ‘Now can you see?’ Donna Rosa asked with great emotion.

Gripping the eyeglasses with her hands, as if fearful that they would be taken away from her, her eyes half closed and her mouth half open in a rapt smile, Eugenia took two steps backward, and stumbled on a chair.

‘Good luck!’ said the Amodios’ maid.

‘Good luck!’ said the Greborio sister.

‘She looks like a schoolteacher, doesn’t she?’ Don Peppino observed with satisfaction.

‘Not even a thank you!’ said Aunt Nunzia, looking bitterly at the dress. ‘With all that, good luck!’

‘She’s afraid, my little girl!’ murmured Donna Rosa, heading towards the door of the basement room to put down her things. ‘She’s wearing the eyeglasses for the first time!’ she said, looking up at the first-floor balcony, where the other Greborio sister was looking out.

‘I see everything very tiny,’ said Eugenia, in a strange voice, as if she were speaking from under a chair. ‘Black, very black.’

‘Of course: the lenses are double. But do you see clearly?’ asked Don Peppino. ‘That’s the important thing. She’s wearing the glasses for the first time,’ he, too, said, addressing Cavaliere Amodio, who was passing by, holding an open newspaper.

‘I’m warning you,’ the cavaliere said to Mariuccia, after staring at Eugenia for a moment, as if she were merely a cat, ‘that stairway hasn’t been swept. I found some fish bones in front of the door!’ And he went on, bent over, almost enfolded in his newspaper, reading an article about a proposal for a new pension law that interested him.